15 
Dr. JOHNSON. 
By G. S. RITCHIE. January 22nd, 1907. 
On the 16th of May, 1763, in a bookseller’s back parlour 
in Covent Garden, Samuel Johnson met his disciple and 
biographer, James Boswell. 
An insignificant incident in the life of Johnson — to Boswell, 
ever ambitious of literary achievement, the meeting was the 
flood of the fortunate tide. Thenceforward the better part 
of his time and abilities was devoted to the contemplation 
and delineation of his hero’s character. The fruits of his 
consecrated zeal not only served for his own immortality, but 
established also on an enduring basis the fame of Dr. Johnson. 
For among literary men Johnson’s position is unique. Our 
interest in the personal history of a man of letters follows, 
as the rule, our interest in his books ; our interest in J ohnson’s 
books is secondary to our interest in their author’s personality. 
Regarded by his contemporaries as a classic, for us he lives 
in the pages of Boswell as an entertaining companion. 
At Lichfield, where his father, Michael Johnson, carried 
on business as a bookseller, Samuel Johnson was born in 1709. 
He was afflicted in infancy with scrofula, which disfigured 
his face, entirely destroying, apparently, the use of one of his 
eyes and much impairing the sight of the other. 
After some years at school and a period of indiscriminate 
reading at home he went up in his nineteenth year to Pem- 
broke College, Oxford. Poverty, with which he was only 
commencing his thirty years’ struggle, forced his college 
career to an untimely and degreeless end, and at the age of 
twenty-two he returned home suffering from an inherited 
melancholy which he never shook off. 
Shortly afterwards Michael Johnson died. His son inherited 
a patrimony of twenty pounds and went in quest of fortune 
first to a situation as usher in a school in Leicestershire. At 
the age of twenty-four he married the middle-aged and affected 
widow of a Birmingham silk-mercer, esteeming her while she 
lived the jewel of her sex, and after her death in 1752 as a 
sainted and enduring memory. 
